Google AdWords Keyword Evaluation Changes

Google AdWords Announcement about the Keyword Evaluation Changes

You asked, and we listened. In the coming weeks, we'll simplify our keyword status system and introduce quality-based minimum bids, giving you more control to run on keywords that you find important. We believe these changes will result in higher quality ads.

What's changing

Simplified account management: Your keywords will be active or inactive — instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled. In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don't meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.


Quality-based minimum bids: Soon, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid based on its Quality Score. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be given lower minimum bids to stay active and trigger ads. Keywords with a lower Quality Score (including those that are currently on hold) will have the opportunity to run if your keyword or Ad Group's maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid.

The Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.

Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).
What you should do

Here are some suggestions for what you should do before and after we implement the changes described above:

Before implementation: If you're happy with your current keyword list, there's no need to make any changes. However, if you have any on hold keywords that you don't want to trigger ads, we suggest you delete them from your account. This is because any keywords with a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC could be activated and accrue ad clicks. You can use our Find and Edit Keywords tool, available in your account's Tools page, to quickly search for and delete any keywords in your account.

After implementation: We'll email you after we implement these changes. You should then log in to your account and monitor your keyword performance under these new guidelines. Any disabled keywords at the time of implementation will remain labeled as disabled in your account. Several weeks later, we'll delete them. This period of time is meant to give you an opportunity to review your disabled keywords and activate them.

Finally, to ensure your ads are optimized for performance, we suggest you continue to improve your keywords and ad text for relevancy.